The terms of our Agreement (2012v1)
about this Agreement
Everyone wants terms and conditions (we prefer to call it an agreement) to be as simple as possible with no small print, and no undefined jargon and so; with abodeMove THERE IS NO SMALL PRINT AND NO UNDEFINED JARGON and so of course this means our Agreement may appear a little longer than other peoples, but much simpler we hope.
We have included a small amount of italicised text to help you with the understanding of the clauses, but if they are inconsistent in any way the clause itself takes priority and if you think this is the case you should immediately contact us and do NOT accept the provisions of the Agreement.
We have what we believe are the fairest, clearest, and hence the most favourable Agreement of any estate agent which anyone (taking the time to of course) can easily read and understand, and accordingly:
- If you are not happy being bound by all parts of the Agreement, PLEASE DO NOT AGREE TO IT, we do not want you to sign up to our service if you are not happy with it.
- If you do not understand any of the parts of the Agreement PLEASE DO NOT AGREE TO IT, we do not want you to sign up to our service if you don't understand it.
- If you are unsure about anything in the Agreement, PLEASE DO NOT AGREE TO IT, we do not want you to sign up to our service if you are not sure about something.
PLEASE DO CALL US, or we can call you if you want us to help you with anything you don't understand, as this Agreement is legally binding once. We won't be angry, we would be glad to explain any terms we use as we appreciate that although we understand these terms, we have prior knowledge of certain terminology used which the general public may not be used to using, and we wrote them! As a point to note, we can try to help you understand the agreement as best we can, but sometimes a member of staff may say something that you misinterpret, and/or they may explain it badly, so for the avoidance of doubt, this written agreement is your agreement with us and nothing our staff say can override this, and you will need to seek your own independent legal advice if you are not sure about something written in this agreement as once you agree to it, then you are bound by it.
CLAUSES RELATING TO THIS AGREEMENT
REFUNDS AND COOLING-OFF
We understand that all clients want to be sure they are happy with any product or service they receive, and we certainly don't want an unhappy client, therefore once you have paid (where this is applicable), and/or instructed us, we are pleased to have made the decision, in our pursuit of fairness and customer satisfaction, to offer you up to midnight after 7 days to decide whether you want to use our services, which is what is generally called a cooling off period.
This might be helpful if you wish to confirm that you do wish to take up our service with another person who is perhaps at work for example, or if you just change your mind for any reason at all. If you do decide to cancel, you need to send an email to the email address as found on our contact page from time to time BEFORE midnight on the date the seven days ends, including the following information: the FULL NAMES of all vendors; the FULL ADRRESS INCLUDING POSTCODE of the property concerned; the REFERENCE OF YOUR PROPERTY, and finally the reason for cancellation. You then need to make sure that you receive back WITHIN 24 WORKING HOURS a CANCELLATION CONFIRMATION email. If you do not follow this procedure your cancellation may not be accepted as we may have incurred costs such as dealing with your ID, arranging photographs etc. Accordingly, if you decide to exercise your right to cool off, we will postpone incurring any cost including any EPC or sign orders, photographs etc and indeed will not start marketing your property until you are happy to proceed. If you decide at the outset you are happy with our service, and you don't need a cooling off period, then we would be glad to get started straight away, and we will take a property description and await your ID and arrange any EPC, photographs etc, but please be aware that we will begin incurring our costs immediately and hence you will waive the option to cancel or obtain a refund if this is the case.
ACCESS
You expressly agree to allow us and anyone we reasonably authorise to access to your property (where applicable) at reasonable times (which may include evenings and weekends) to carry out viewings, take photographs, undertake EPC's, surveys etc, and do anything else we reasonably need to do in order to fulfil our obligations etc. in order to complete our service and sell your property. If you decide you wish to carry out any of these services (i.e. you are doing your own rental or sale viewings), you must also adhere to these terms and be avilaible at all reasonable times.
ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT
You will accept this agreement by selecting the appropriate options on the abodeMove.co.uk website (you may not instruct in any other way i.e. by telephone as you may not have read the most up to date terms and conditions), and you will receive a copy of them by email, there is NO HARD COPY unless you specifically email us to ask for it.
DISTANCE SELLING AND ESTATE AGENTS ACT
We comply with the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 and the Estate Agents Act 1979.
MARKETING
You allow us to do whatever we reasonably can to gain exposure for and market your property which will involve revealing the address, arranging viewings, advertising in newspapers, magazines, property portals and websites as appropriate, and also putting it on Rightmove as soon as reasonably practicable. We may also at our discretion involve or engage any other parties to increase the chance of a sale at our own cost.
PAYMENT AND COLLECTION OF FEES
Where you have not paid IN FULL at the outset for our services, we are to be paid IN FULL in the event that any willing party (and this is anyone, including associates, family members, friends, and/or people they introduce or that their agents introduce to them), who is ready and able to buy that we introduce to you, and/or your property and that purchases your property, whether or not the contract is still in force at the time the purchase is effected. To clarify, if a purchaser has become aware of your property as a result of our business (and this includes but is not limited to seeing our For Sale board, Rightmove listing, any other form of marketing such as mass mailing, or being told by you that you have engaged an Estate Agent etc), the fee will also be payable IN FULL. All these terms include family members, and friends that we are notified about AFTER youn instruct, we expect you to have checked that nobody you know wishes to purchase your property before we expend effort to even explain how our service works otherwise our service gets more expensive for everyone.
Where you have agreed to pay us at the outset you will do so using our telephone, bank transfer, or online payment facility at our discretion. At this time, you will also be required pay for any additional extras (such as EPC's and "For Sale" boards) that you may require at the outset.
Where we have agreed a recurring cost then you will may required to make the first payment at the outset, using our telephone, bank transfer, or by monthly Direct Debit, or using online payment facility at our discretion.
Where applicable, when you sign this agreement, (unless we confirm in writing to the solicitor that we have already been paid, or there is no solicitor for whatever reason in which case you will pay us direct in the same way as the solicitor) you are authorising that your solicitors pay our fees directly into our bank as a result of a commission becoming due to us, by BACS or CHAPS (at yours or their expense -WE WILL NOT PAY TO RECEIVE OUR FEES) BEFORE anything is sent to you, or any other party next in line and if there is any shortfall, we shall require you to pay this money to the solicitor prior to completion, or exceptionally, if this cannot or does not happend, we require this direct from you within 5 working days of completion. Our HSBC bank account name is; abode, the sort code is 40-17-14, and the account number is 11894463, and the reference will be as much of the property reference as can be entered with any characters that cannot be validly entered being replaced by a hyphen "-". We must reitterate, that by signign this agreement, you are agreeing for the solicitor to discharge our bill first and if the Solicitor unusually wishes to charge you for paying the Estate Agent, then YOU MUST PAY THESE FEES NOT US -PLEASE CHECK YOUR SOLICITORS TERMS.
TERMINATION
Unles otherwise stated, this contract can only be terminated after six months by giving one months notice or we may terminate it immediately if you breach it in any way and/or at our discretion. If you decide you want to terminate the contract then you will be responsible for all fees for services rendered at our published rates from time to time AT THE TIME THEY WERE carried out. For example, if we arranged an EPC for you and at the time we did do the published price was £10 but we did not charge you for it, then if you terminate the contract at a time that we are charging £20 for EPC's then you will only be liable for £10. This is to discourage clients taking up out offer of free items, being unrealsitic about their sale price and/or refusing to sell then going to another agent with all the items we prepared for free, which would mean that we would not be able to operate an efficent service and our prices would accordingly have to go up.
ADDITIONAL EXTRAS
We act as an introducer to obtain any other services such as Conveyancing, EPC's, gas checks, floorplans, and/or other services and works, etc and as YOU are actually their client so they have a contractual obligation to you, not to us. This has the advantage that if you have a problem with anything you can go direct to source to rectify it without having to come back through us. In addition they are your responsibility, i.e. if your "For Sale" board is stolen, you will need to purchase another one, and similarly it is yours to take down and keep.
STANDARD CLAUSES RELATING THE LEGALITIES OF THIS AGREEMENT RATHER THAN THIS AGREEMENT ITSELF
STATUTORY AND GENERAL LEGAL RIGHTS
None of our Agreement attempts to exclude your statutory and general legal rights and in fact here is some further background advice regarding your statutory and general legal rights. The Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 (which is part of the law in England and Wales) states that any goods must fit their description, be fit for their purpose and be of satisfactory quality. It further states that any services must be carried out with reasonable care and skill, within a reasonable time and for no more than a reasonable charge (the reasonable charge is unless a pre-agreed price is charged). For example if you feel that we haven't done what Agreement say we will do you, then your statutory rights mean that you can ask for your money back as we have not provided what you have paid for. In addition, if you feel any company (including us) have misrepresented our goods or services in anyway, then you can also claim some or all of your money back.
If you believe you have a genuine right to claim, and would like some independent advice, you can take the terms and conditions that you have agreed to (in our case this Agreement), along with a description of the reason you feel you have the right to claim to any solicitor offering a free half hour consultation (most solicitors do this, you can check on the internet or the best place is usually the yellow pages), with a brief description of the problem and they will be able to advise you further.
NOTICE
Any notices under this agreement must be made by email to the email address as found on our contact page from time to time and will not be deemed served UNLESS you can show that we have acknowledged the email. We will not unreasonably withhold acknowledgement if we do receive the email, and will usually acknowledge within 48 working hours Monday to Friday, but if we do not, YOU MUST CALL US to ensure that we do have it. If you also require a postal address, you may also send it to our head office address from time to time which can be found in the "contact us" part of our website, and on the companies house website.
WARRANTIES AND DISCLAIMER
We make no representations as to the availability and suitability and correctness of our services, other than we will do our best to sell your property with the tools available to us! An example of this might be that our website and potentially a third party website like Rightmove may from time to time be offline for emergency maintenance or for any reason outside our reaosnable control and though we will make every endeavour to ensure this is a short period where we have any ability to control this, and at a suitable time (if possible outside working hours), we cannot be responsible for these technical issues that may arise and may or not be even our fault. Another example might be that there may not be an appointment time that you are happy with for the photographs to be taken until after you wanted to start marketing the property -if you cannot be in for any reason, then this isn't our fault! Another example might be that we have misinterpreted some information that you gave us, again we can't be held responsible for this. These examples are not exhaustive, and it is up to you to review the information that we hold and display about you and your property. This way you, the person that has allowed the information to be used, are simply validating it, and we are sure you understand that this is fair.
PROPERTY MIS-DESCRIPTION ACT 1991
We take all reasonable steps to make sure that all statements, whether written or oral, about the property, are accurate and not misleading, so you agree to check any descritpions we write and notify us of any inaccuracies as soon as resaosnably practicable so that we may ammend them.
TRUTH AND DEFAMATION
This simply means that you must at all times tell the truth which won't be a problem for the majority of people. You are reminded that you must not at any point say or write any untrue comments about, you, your property or anything related to this Agreement us (whether this be on the application form, or in open speech), and if you do and we have to take action as a result of this, you agree to be responsible for paying for our costs of addressing this and of course any damages.
INDEMNITY
This means that if you do something that is not specifically allowed under the Agreement, and this causes us any sort of detriment, you will be responsible for paying us back, which we think is fair enough. You agree to indemnify us against all liability, including but not limited to legal fees and any costs or losses or expenses in relation to any claims or actions brought against us as a result of you not adhering to this Agreement.
CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP
This means that ownership of abodeMove.co.uk changes hands that this Agreement is still binding This Agreement shall be binding on you and us, and our respective successors and permitted assigns.
WHOLE OF AGREEMENT
This statement essentially means that we don't expect you to take anything we say as written into the agreement unless it actually is! This Agreement constitutes the entire agreement and understanding between the parties and, save as otherwise stated in this Agreement supersedes all previous agreements, understandings and arrangements, of whatever nature or form. In addition, each party acknowledges and agrees that, save as otherwise stated in this Agreement, it has not relied upon any representation, statement, warranty, undertaking, promise or assurance, and neither party shall be under any liability or shall have any remedy in respect of misrepresentation or untrue statement, warranty, undertaking, promise or assurance unless and to the extent that a remedy lies under the provisions of this Agreement. Nothing in this clause is intended to limit or exclude any party's liability for fraud.
NOTICE OF VARIATION
This means you cannot write something in an email, and because a salesman fails to address it correctly you can say it is part of the agreement UNLESS a director agrees this in writing. The provisions of this Agreement may not be varied or supplemented without the written agreement of a director of abode.
CONTINUING WAIVER
This means if you do breach this agreement, and we waive our right to terminate the agreement on one or more times, that this does not mean you can do it again and expect us to waive our right the next time. The waiver by abodeMove of any provision of this Agreement shall not be construed as a continuing waiver or a waiver of any subsequent breach of the same or any other provisions, nor shall any delay or omission on our part to exercise or avail ourselves of any right, power or privilege that we have or may have under this Agreement operate as a waiver of any breach by us.
SEVERABILITY
This means that if any of the clauses are not able to be part of this Agreement for any reason this does not void the whole agreement. If any provision of this Agreement shall be found by any court or administrative body of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or in any way unenforceable, such provision shall not affect the other provisions of this Agreement which shall remain in full force and effect.
JURISDICTION
This simply means that if there is a problem that it will dealt with under English law. This Agreement and all matters arising from or in connection with it are governed by and shall be interpreted in accordance with English law. The parties agree that the English courts have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute arising from or in connection with this Agreement.
CAPACITY
This means that you are legally able to sign this agreement, i.e. you could not market next doors house without their permission By agreeing to the provisions of this agreement, you warrant that you have the legal capacity to be bound by it
MONEY LAUNDERING AND IDENTIFICATION
There are new rules regarding money laundering that have come into force recently and we adhere to them vehemently, and as such we will undertake the necessary checks to comply with the relevant laws. THIS IS NOT A CREDIT CHECK AND WILL NOT AFFECT YOU CREDIT RATING IN ANY WAY -IT IS SIMPLY TO ESTABLISH THAT YOU ARE WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE and to make sure that you are not a criminal using our business to launder money. All estate agents should be signed up to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) 's anti-money laundering register, if the one you are using is not then they are breaking the law. In additon, we may instruct checks at HM Land Registry to confirm the owner of any property that we are asked to deal with. To comply with the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, we have registered with the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) who will supervise our business to ensure we are meeting our legal obligations regarding money laundering. We have trained our staff and appointed a Money Laundering Reporting Officer within our organisation who implements anti-money laundering systems. As a result we verify everyone's identity before we engage in business with them, and may undertake any other relevant checks and investigation and act in accordance with the Money Laundering Regulations 2007 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 if we reasonably suspect that there may be a cause for concern, or often simply as a part of our procedure.
CREDIT CHECKS FOR LETTINGS ONLY
If you are a tenant, we will perform a credit search at all or any credit reference agencies as part of the application procedure to provide our landlords with a better service.
DATA CONTROLLER
We have registered with the Information Commissioners Office as a Data Controller for the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998.
PRIVACY POLICY
Our privacy policy from time to time can be viewed on our website at the following URL: http://www.abodemove.co.uk/w3c/privacy.html
You may choose "instruct us" from the left menu to buy, sell, rent or let, but if you want to have a chat first or find out more about us, please visit the contact us section to get in touch by phone, email, or post.
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